In search of beneficiaries...

ELISABETH BEATRICE Puddle died intestate at the age of 88 in 1939… but news of her case came to us only in 2001!
The whole problem would have gone unnoticed until a property developer attempted to locate the owner of a plot of land on the outskirts of Southampton. Seaside cities with good links to London were becoming hot property at the end of the 1990s. Developers were keen to purchase empty land to transform into plush apartment complexes and cater for new upwardly mobile twenty and thirty somethings flooding the city.
Elisabeth Beatrice Puddle had inherited one third of a piece of land property, which was to be shared between herself, her sister Alice and her brother Alfie some years before her death, however the land, mostly heath and woodland at the edge of the New Forest had been left untouched since then.
The question therefore revolved around who the property belonged to now and who should get the profits of the sale. It emerged that Puddle, who was born in 1851, and her husband John had not had any of their own children, meaning that Puddle’s death was to be treated as a usual intestacy – albeit going back in time over 150 years to trace any siblings before she was born.
Puddle was the last of eight brothers and sisters to pass away, four of whom had had children – there were 18 nieces and nephews, all of who were entitled to a proportion of Puddle’s estate. These 18 children, who were born between 1874 and 1916, had themselves all passed away before we started our research, leaving their aunt’s intestacy with a whole string of vested interests as they had survived her. The issue that we were faced with was therefore twofold: for those who had died intestate, their next of kin was located relatively easily. The real difficulty came when we had to deal with those who had left wills; what would happen to their fraction of the estate? This was one of the extremely rare occasions when it would in fact have been far easier for them all to have died intestate!
After lengthy reasoning and legal advice, it was decided to follow the line of the executor of the will, as this person would have the power to administer the estate to the relevant parties. What this actually meant in practice, was that part of the estate was to be diverted on a complete tangent to Puddle’s blood line, as we needed to identify and locate the executor’s executor, where Puddle’s nephew Walter had emigrated to the US. He died in 1959 and although he was survived by his wife Judy, she had not wanted to be the executrix on her husband’s will – so she had renounced her rights.
The state of New Jersey therefore appointed her brother, Edward Edmonson – a complete stranger to the Puddle family – to administer the estate. This complicated the situation substantially as he died only two years later, leaving his wife to inherit his estate, including this executorship of Walter’s unexpected inheritance. Imagine our frustration to find that his wife Sandra died only a few years later sometime between 1965 and 1967 (we found her will but were unable to establish the exact date of her passing away), although she did name her own daughter as the personal representative of her estate.
Two further generations down the same family (and three generations away from Walter, Puddle’s nephew), Sandra’s grand daughter was located as the rightful decision maker. It was now a question of good faith for her to take on the distribution of part of an inheritance to people completely unrelated to her, which understandably she wasn’t very enthusiastic about. It had taken three years to follow the stem all the way to the US and now everything hung in the balance.
Another stem meanwhile, Puddle’s sister Maud’s eldest child George named the executor of his will as the bursar of the Community of the Resurrection, a small monastic community based in West Yorkshire. George’s vested interest therefore had to be followed down the line of brothers at the monastery to find the current bursar and hope that he would accept the executor’s task.
After some convincing, and almost 65 years after her death, Puddle’s estate was finally settled as both of these individuals, as well as the two other executors unrelated to her, agreed to help to finalise the administration of the estate, much to the relief of all those involved, researchers included. Bearing in mind that since her death, the country has been through World War II, which savaged a whole generation of young men and women, rapid modernisation and both social and economic changes by the inception of the EEC in 1957, several monarchs including the coronation of Elizabeth II, and such cultural phenomena as the introduction of a National Health Service in 1948, man landing on the moon in 1969 in the thick of the Cold War culminating with the fall of communism in Europe – it really is quite incredible that the little plot of land on the edge of the city remained untouched and ignored for such a long time.